Iowa social conservatives laud Marco Rubio – and his competition

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/31/marco-rubio-iowa-social-conservatives

Version 0 of 1.

In the heart of socially conservative northwestern Iowa, Marco Rubio is maintaining his momentum. On Wednesday night, the Florida senator shone in the third Republican debate. On Friday night, evangelicals who have previously backed the likes of Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee expressed openness towards the Florida senator too.

Related: Paul Singer backs Marco Rubio in boost for senator and blow for Bush

The North West Iowa Republican Rally is held jointly by six county Republican parties in Orange City, Iowa, a Dutch-American enclave where the GOP regularly picks up more than 80% of the vote. Rubio, with his career alongside Democrats in the US Senate and relatively nuanced positions on issues such as immigration, was not a natural fit for such a social conservative audience.

He received a standing ovation.

After he spoke, Rubio was swarmed by reporters who had waited half an hour just to get three minutes with the new political star. Back in the room, however, attendees sat patiently. They then gave standing ovations to Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie. Santorum received one as well.

Nearly a thousand people packed into the basketball gym at Northwestern College, an educational institution so explicitly Christian that, in its logo, the first letter T is seen as a cross. Among this crowd, Donald Trump was an afterthought. The other outsider candidate at the top of the polls, Ben Carson, was the favorite.

Old voters and young were excited about the retired neurosurgeon. Barbara Grady liked Carson, she said, as someone willing to follow the constitution. Her husband, Arv, leaned more towards the Texas senator Ted Cruz – for the same reasons. According to Lincoln Morris and Joseph Tolsma, two students with a group called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action – which aims to draw attention to the issue from a Christian perspective – Carson had “a huge following” on campus.

Yet the support for Carson was soft. No one was willing to commit to caucusing for him in February. Instead, they said liked him, that he may even have been their favorite … but they were keeping an open mind. And they were very interested in listening to Rubio too.

Among Friday’s crowd, there wasn’t any particular reason given for such hesitation about committing to Carson. Some, like Tom Farnsworth, a county supervisor in nearby O’Brien County, went so far as to worry that he was a little too soft-spoken. (Farnsworth insisted, however, that he really liked him.)

In fact, in this rather godly crowd, it was difficult to find anyone willing to say a bad word about anyone. Marv Wynia, a farmer from outside Sioux Center, said his hesitation about Rubio lay only in the fact the Florida senator “appeared too young”. He too leaned towards Carson, he said, whom he liked for his contemplative and “laid back” manner.

There was lingering support for Santorum, too, but also worry over whether he could possibly win. Frank Bulk of Sioux Center said that while Santorum resonated the most with him, he worried if he could appeal as successfully to the rest of the country. Despite winning the Iowa caucuses in 2012, Santorum has yet to crack the top 10 in national polls and has thus not appeared in a prime-time debate.

Related: Republican rising star Marco Rubio passes $1m raised since debate

A handful of folks were more enthusiastic about Rubio. Pete Wagner, the owner of the N’West Iowa Review, the local weekly paper, said he had long had his eye on him. He was one of many attendees who shared a deep skepticism of Trump, whom he viewed as a “self-promoter” – although few were willing so explicitly to say so. One attendee, looking to find positives about Trump, insisted to the Guardian that he was “high energy”, and that was a good thing.

The typical attendee probably was someone like Darrell Hoekstra, a middle-aged and mustachioed man from Alton. He said he had missed the CNBC debate because he didn’t have cable television and was still trying to pick from a field of what he thought were all good candidates. Hoekstra said he “really appreciated anyone with strong stands on pro-life and pro-family issues”.

It was clear that on such issues Hoekstra and others liked Rubio. But in nice north-western Iowa, they liked everyone else as well.